So, I might get an opportunity to run a Mass Effect game with the premise that the players are replacing Shepard from the start of the first game. The plot starts out as normal but may diverge significantly later based on what the players do.

Additionally though, I'm thinking it could be more fun if I modified some things. While the setting is the same on the surface, many of the "secrets" and the overall plot stuff would be altered to some degree or another, so as to keep things more tense for the players. Likewise, some of the characters from the games would be replaced/nonexistent, others would be different takes on the same characters, and maybe some minor NPCs would get more prominent roles as well.

Anyway, I have some ideas for what I want to do with this myself, and I'll probably post some of those a bit later, but I wanted to see what ideas /tg/ would have for an alternate, RP-suitable Mass Effect plot that would still keep the same setting and main premise.

Also, could someone explain what the hell was the point of the Collectors attacking? I'm still not sure I fully get it. Mass Effect 2 had some fun points but it always felt like something of a side story to the Reaper story of ME and ME3.

>>24506736Basically, they were abducting enough humans to make a Human reaper in advance of the actual Reaper assault. As I understand it, the Reapers were most likely going to do this after the invasion to make more of their kind, it's just that the Collectors were instructed by Harbinger to start early in order to both have a Reaper already in the galaxy (since Sovereign ate it) and just to generally scout out and prepare the way for the actual invasion

>>24506736It's been a while since I played, but to my knowledge/memory, the Collectors were collecting because they wanted to create a human Reaper, either to increase their numbers or because humans were badass enough to kill one. Something like all the Reapers they had prior were based off of the Protheians.

>Also, could someone explain what the hell was the point of the Collectors attacking? I'm still not sure I fully get it. Mass Effect 2 had some fun points but it always felt like something of a side story to the Reaper story of ME and ME3.

The whole point was to make the human reaper. But yea. The whole thing doesn't make sense.

If you ask me, you will have to rewrite the whole of mass effect 2 and 3.

Get rid of the resurrection plot that doesn't go anywhere. Rewrite Cerbrius so they don't end up inexplicably becoming a galactic superpower they did in ME3 (i.e. don't let them have reaper tech)

Keep the shadow broker as a neutral party, and make him useful. They nerfed him after ME2 in favour of Cerberus.

My advice is to completely ignore Mass Effect 2 and 3, if you look into either of them you'll just find that they are rife with contradictions and plot holes. Just write your own continuation of the story, you don't need those two shit stories, you have fucking Cthulhu robots from outer space attacking. The third game has a few interesting elements but in the end the story there is just as convoluted and forced as the second game's attempt at a plot.

I prefer Cerberus as a shadowy conspiracy group rather than mind controlled Space Nazis, yeah. It may be relatively fine for a video game, but it still was kinda lazy.

Shadow Broker would be very fun to use for moral dilemmas and plot hooks and such, so yeah, he stays. Unless the players decide to take him down or something. Also, thinking of not having it be a Yahg? Maybe one of the other rumors about him is true instead.

>>24506823I always felt that the human reaper was to replace Sovereign and open the portal directly to where the other reapers are hiding out. They only started moving towards the galaxy (which took them what, two, three months? Why didn't they just do that to begin with?) after the skelereaper was destroyed.

>>24506823The idea behind it is that an unexpected human reaper would be able to take Sovereign's place, lead an assault on the Citadel and bring about Sovereign's plan; taking complete control of the mass relay network and bringing in the Reapers directly from deep space.

Unfortunately, by the time that ME3 came about the developers conveniently forgot about the "complete control over the mass relays" part.

Anyway, yeah, we'd probably take the story in a different direction after ME1. One of the things I'm wondering in that case is whether to keep the Collectors or not? Maybe give them a different story role, though. Even if the secret behind them (altered Protheans serving as Harbinger's gloves) is still the same, maybe they can be more of a shadowy threat rather than mass kidnappers.

Of course, it may be better to keep it vague whether they are in fact with the Reapers or not, and have them try to trick the Human Spectre into cooperating with them against the Reapers. In reality it could just be Harbinger's trolling, or they might be more autonomous agents/working for some other "faction" within the Reaper mind/a more or less independent alien race with its own creepy but non-Reaper agenda. Again, having them be Reaper cannon fodder seemed kind of like a waste after building up their mystique.

>>24507231>What was the explanation for that one? If there was one.There was one. Basically in Drew Karpyshyn (the guy who wrote Mass Effect 1 and the outline of basically the entire trilogy) the Reapers didn't kill everyone periodically because lolAI bullshit, that was David Gaider being a fuckhead. The true reason had to do with the fact that biotics are way more significant than they appear to be, get fucking stronger the longer you allow them to persist and at their peak become Silver Surfer type superhero shit. The thing is all that power is coming from SOMEWHERE, and the more widespread biotics are the more entropy is shunted into the universe by use of their powers and the quicker the ultimate death of the universe comes.

OKThe collectors could work if they were given a different role. The 'genetic diversity = special' thing was a stupid idea. The thing I liked about ME 1 was that humans were trying to find a place amongst the galaxy among a sceptical galactic community. They sort of forgot about that during ME 2 and 3.

But one thing is that you shouldn't let the collectors take all the focus during the ME 2 part of the plot. The ME 2 part of the plot should be laying the foundations to a united galaxy, not wasting time with the collectors. That was the biggest mistake of Mass Effect 2.

Thanks! Somehow didn't hear about this before. Not sure if I'd use it as suggested, but it is an angle I hadn't thought about before, and which might make the endgame different in an interesting way if incorporated.

Probably, yeah. I don't see much appeal in trying to reenact the Suicide Mission anyway. "Mass Effect 2" would be more about a shadow war between different factions (Shadow Broker, Cerberus, Collectors, maybe some others), Reaper research and trying to prepare for the invasion. No sending the players on a wild Geth chase either.

Best as I can figure out, the reaper plan (that had worked loads of times before) was pretty much what they stated in ME1, they use the stuff they conveniently leave lying around to guide how the races develop so they always follow an path that makes them easy to beat. (No explanation why, this is a GOOD thing.)

Cue the Protheans, who managed to hang in long enough after the invasion to create the conduit. It's stated they sabotaged the keepers, but my guess would be they also sabotaged the citadel in some way so as to make the doomsday switch only accessible by something that vaguely resembled their shape. Hence why in the end Sovereign was forced to have to use Saren to hit the controls and directly take over. He needed the hands, so to speak. My thoughts are that being that directly involved in a mind would have led to some sort of feedback when Shephard killed them the second time, leaving him stunned long enough for the Normandy to land a hit with it's mass driver cannon.

>>24507668Now, based on this, I figure Harbinger was a sort of backup plan. The reapers may have never thought they would need one, but they would have prepared anyway. Basically, the collectors are re-purposed Protheans, that another Reaper could control much like a puppet to achieve goals within the galaxy while they were stuck outside. The aim was that if something unforeseen happened to Sovereign, they could then construct a replacement for him. Obviously, they collectors themselves would not be able to simply march into the citadel and hit the switch because the Reapers would assume the races would not be on guard. As for why they chose humans, that actually makes sense from one of the explanations in-game. Sovereign had contact with Shephard, and would most likely have transmitted this information to the others, so they would have a fair idea of what had taken him out. So the next reaper would be designed specifically to counter that threat that cost them the last.>>24507688In ME1, they give no reason why, and I think that helped make them a better villain. Monstrous and unknowable, incomprehensible and genocidal.

They got lucky there, though, because you had a bunch of races who were so very happy to ignore all the evidence or the reapers as it came to them. It would also explain why the collectors were doing so well, since no one would connect them to the threat, and it gives you Cerberus as a rising force for the human faction of the galaxy.

ME3 was just pants-on-head retarded, and needs to be forgotten like all the plot details it blew off.

Mmm. Could be fun to leave a bunch of red herrings and IC speculation from different figures on what horrible threat the Reapers are really trying to avert, only for it turn out that they're really just very hungry. Or maybe it's all reproduction for reproduction's sake. Or both.

You'd think they'd be able to make a Turian or Asari Reaper though, as Sovereign was in much more prolonged contact with Saren and Benezia. But I guess a) Shepard DID cost them Sovereign and b) it's harder to kidnap Turians or Asari without putting everyone on alert. Humans in a dangerous part of the galaxy, on the other hand...

Okay, that part is somewhat sensible, but the main plan (do what Sovereign tried to do, again, after tipping everyone off and likely without a Saren or an army of Geth) still strikes me as unlikely.

>>24507816Don't get me wrong, there were moments that were enjoyable. But looking at it fromt he perspective of trying to create a playable canon for OP's game, you really have to throw it out of the window, because so much of it just doesn't make any sense, or clearly forgets what happened before.

That said, I would have to say that the whole concept of rallying the galaxy was a good premise. And the whole Quarian insanity over re-taking their world and starting a war with the Geth in the middle of your plans does seem in character. Part of what failed in the games was that you never really felt like the races were all that diverse. Mordin's little spiel about humans being so diverse of a people is really just a way over covering up the lack of actual diversity among a species. Honestly, any race that has been around longer then humans is going to be incredibly diverse culturally and politically. At least the first game tried to do that with the various comments on Turian facial markings and civil wars...

I actually didn't hate it either (I can see the plot holes and inconsistencies just fine - it was still pretty fun and had some great sets, though), but then I just have strange tastes in game endings. In any case, I still want to do something completely different here.

>>24507856If you think about it though, Harbinger had no real choice, because his hands (tentacles?) had been tied by that little group of Protheans who sabotaged the citadel. At this point, the only way to open the relay to allow the reapers through is to get something vaguely-Prothean to the citadel to punch the controls and open the way. By creating a human reaper, you massively weaken their numbers, and have a machine designed specifically to counter the threat to the reapers. (Remember, Sovereign blew right through the citadel fleet with minimal effort. It was only Shephard who stopped him by killing Saren. And my guess was that he had invested a lot to get Saren implanted enough to make a suitable conduit for direct control.)

I agree with scrapping ME2 and 3 altogether. And, if there's anything you'll be taking from ME1 word for word, it has to be the exchange with Sovereign on Virmire. Hands down best villain conversation ever

>>24508097In the Xeelee Sequence, the photino birds (dark matter lifeforms) just kill stars early so that only stable(ie, that'll last trillions years) corpses of stars are left, since they need the gravity to live, but stars collapsing messes them up or something. So they speed it all up.Also, dark matter only interact with regular matter by gravity. So, not really gameable.

Also, there's a big ancient alien race in those books too, the Xeelee, they're a race that appeared very early, and they tried to fight off the photino birds. But they failed. So instead, they tried escaping to another universe. The humans meet up several alien races and shit, it's all fun and games, and then they declare war on the Xeelee, kick them out the Milky Way for some time, but lose when they come back, to the point they're only a few hundreds/thousands left, and they too escape to other universes through the Xeele construct.

>>24508097probably just an eldritch abomination for story purposes. Maybe you could turn into some final boss at the end of the game, but that would be too far off from now though. So maybe just keep it in the background for extremely subtle allusions (if any at all)?

>>24507882>Honestly, any race that has been around longer then humans is going to be incredibly diverse culturally and politically.Not really. Just look at the current, inescapale trend towards globalization. Go long enough and it becomes one world, one people.

>>24508097Well, that's the point. He would still need a collector to push the literal switch and open the door. But with the "human" Reaper, it would mean that this time there wouldn't be any humans, or too few humans, in the way to actually stop the assault. But yes, the human reaper would be Sovereign's replacement. Think of it as an upgrade, in a sense, because the next cycle, you've got your new Sovereign better-equipped to handle the next batch, whatever they might be.

And actually, that would be very good writing, because it gives yet another reason to have to collectors be Prothean and not be wiped out.

>>24508383But we're all stuck on one little rock. Do you really think different planets, in different solar systems, in different parts of the galaxy are all going to similar? Even with the Prothean ruins, each culture is going to do it's own thing, based on how they grew up. Within two generations, you'd have entirely new groups. Look at how fast just one or two countries here have changed in the last century.

One thing I'd definitely want to use is a stronger conflict between biotics and, uh, anti-biotics (...dammit; need a better name). That biotic terrorist/cultist plotline at least seems like it could have a lot of potential, as could the anti-biotic panics caused by the terrorists and the leak, especially on remote worlds that the party happens to visit.

And of course there may be some people who want to work with the Reapers because they think that they're here to save the universe from either the increasingly powerful biotics themselves or the consequences of their actions... only to get indoctrinated and used to demoralise and undermine any defenders (or just to plunge the galaxy into a civil war on the brink of the invasion, during the "Mass Effect 2" part).

And yeah, all of this is pretty long-term stuff, but I would like to be able to drop foreshadowing and such throughout the game.

Mass Effect 1: The main plot is more or less the same, with a different team chasing down various leads and trying to stop Saren before it's too late. With some plot twists and foreshadowing mixed in.

Mass Effect 2: The team has to prepare for the invasion, seeking out further information on the Reapers and seeking allies among various races. In the process they get wrapped up in a shadow war between different factions, all of which try to either use them, destroy them or both. The Reapers use the Collectors and any other agents they could muster to cause trouble and provoke infighting after it becomes clear that they can't just go in through the main door anymore.

Mass Effect 3: the invasion hits, all that the team has accomplished is put to the test, and any failures or unfinished business they might have comes back to haunt them. While past successes, especially with seeking out technologies and assisting research efforts, may mean the Reapers have a surprisingly tough fight in front of them, the coalition ends up having to fight a war on two fronts - not because of Cerberus, though they may still cause some trouble, but because of biotic and anti-biotic upheaval, plus stuff like the Quarian-Geth war and the Krogan-Salarian tensions. In the end it will all have to come down to a confrontation with Harbinger and/or its indoctrinated agents, probably either on Earth or on the Citadel.

I think I'd still want Citadel to play a key part - it's a pretty cool place, and I feel the Keepers were really underused. No Catalyst intelligence there, though. Hell, I think Reapers would work better if they don't have some sort of collective consciousness - each of them is an independent nation, and they just happen to be working as allies. They may well pursue their own grudges and agendas, and perhaps there'd be some way to take advantage of it.

They were created by Leviathans, living starships that mainly hide underwater now. They use to enslave all "lesser" species, and got incredibly lazy so they built The Conduit to manage the slaves. It rebelled, created The Reapers, and started to Reap to "save" species at their peak.

This sounds pretty good, and honestly, the Reapers as allied nations with their own grudges and agendas in the alliance might be something worth exploring.

When you think about it, Reapers don't die normally, and slaying one is a remarkable feat; this means as long as some conversion-worthy species are in the harvest, the fleet never really gets smaller even if a couple of them die, and good harvests increase the size of the allied fleet.

Of course, since they're immortals, they have the same problem as vampires that any offspring to their race aren't their future, they're potential rivals. I'd imagine members of a big military alliance might get uneasy about constantly trying to add more countries with their own goals to the alliance, and when there's enough competing agendas, the unity of the reapers vs everything else cracks. You might even have some rogue reapers pointing out that it's well within their power to just torch the universe completely this time around; trying to brute-force "solve" whatever problem the Reapers are working on by cutting out the middleman of non-reaper life.

I always sort of thought the way the Leviathans were written, it might have been interesting if there was some kind of twist like the KEEPERS were the ones that built the citadel and Mass Relay technology, but their First Contact was with the Leviathans, who enslaved them and used their tech to conquer the galaxy before leaving the Keepers to run the slaves and flow of tribute while the galaxy went to shit around them. The Keepers manage to subtly engineer the "synthetic problem" the Leviathans think needs to be solved, and use that to manipulate the leviathans into giving them permission to build weapons.

The weapons immediately turn on the leviathans, and the Keepers briefly get to celebrate the horrifying genocide of their overlords before Harbinger exceeds its predicted parameters and enslaves them again, starting the cycle of extinction.

Yeah, I'm not at all sure I want to use the Leviathans. They just seem like such a redundant feature for the plot. If they ever existed, they're all dead now, unless I run out of ideas (not to imply that that's what happened to Bioware...).

Indeed. Or perhaps some of them are both furious and terrified at the relative ease with which those puny ants have slain one of their kind, and would decide to focus on hunting them down and destroying their species rather than converting them - causing a civil war between the Reapers.

I think Reapers are in some ways a lot like dragons from folklore, meaning that the main hope for lesser species to triumph over them is to use guile and trick them into, say, fighting each other (as well as scavenging magic weapons I mean ancient technology). Perhaps there may even be some room for brief alliances of convenience between a Reaper and the characters, though I doubt it'd last.

>>24509971I'd imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to do this. Shields would just be imaginary wounds used before normal wounds.Wasn't /tg/ throwing together a Mass Effect TT RPG at one point? Could have sworn I remember reading about it at one point in life.

>>24507464I had a boat load of ideas in a version where they didn't kill shepard/aren't confirmed yet to be the culprits of that or the disappearances( But they are suspects) in this case you get stuff like a shop on omega with a silent collector who trades smaller level items like weapons and gear for gene samples, any money they want is simply to trade with people who only want money

>>24510124Make sure you remain authentic to the original franchise and only include rampant lesbianism because man-on-man is icky... At least until internet pressure forces you to shoehorn a fag into the last game.

wiki says - and I believe it's from a dialogue between Joker and Liara -> In the place of head hair, asari possess semi-flexible, cartilage based scalp crests that grow into shape. These structures are rigid, and do not "flop around" as some believe.

Well, there's also Mass: the Effecting, a WoD hack. Not really sure how good it is, the one game of it I played with died before much of anything could happen.

I'm wondering how I could switch things up in the Mass Effect 1 part. Maybe have a more powerful anti-human conspiracy-slash-Reaper cult behind Saren and Benezia, or have Benezia play a more dominant role.

Also, I think I want Batarians to have a more prominent part this time around, as opposed to being the universe's well-deserving punching bag. I guess this could be accomplished by having an extended Batarian government-backed terror campaign that not-Shepard would run afoul of during his investigations, as opposed to on some out of the way meteor. And during Mass Effect 2 the Batarian special forces would be one of the factions involved, paving the way for a new war with humans unless persuaded otherwise.

Well Saren and Benezia would probably want to stay off the radar while they do their objectives so I doubt they would deliberately make a cult.

Well you could do a mission where you have to gather more evidence to prove Saren's guilt. The whole idea of the council turning on Saren just because of a voice recording is a weak point in the plot.

I agree on having more Batarian's.

Thinking about Batarians, Are you going to keep arrival in? If you ask me the whole idea is quite silly. A reaper clock, Shepard not telling anyone where he was going, and the forced 'difficult' choice.

You best bet is to take ME, and completely ignore ME2 and ME3. The overall plot and writing went completely batshit after ME. Stick to Space Opera.

After the Battle of the Citadel, the Team should go around the galaxy preparing for the inevitable reaper invasion, because the council isn't made of ignorant dumbfucks who're gonna go herderf reapers wut dat.

This should involve enlisting the aid of various governments, putting down various threats (the remaining geth seperatists, the Batarians, the Verge). Bring together a team of the galaxies greatest experts and scientists to work on your own magical anti-reaper macguffin. Resolve threats to the ability of Earth Gov to manufacture ships. Basically do what Mass Effect 2 SHOULD have been.

>>24511577>Well Saren and Benezia would probably want to stay off the radar while they do their objectives so I doubt they would deliberately make a cult.

What I had in mind was more of a... system of sleeper agents and supporters among alien civilians, businesspeople and officials that would obstruct or ambush the team if it gets too close. Kinda like what some of Benezia's pupils were already. And of course many of them may end up being indoctrinated if exposed to technology. Though I agree that this wouldn't be very subtle of them.

>Well you could do a mission where you have to gather more evidence to prove Saren's guilt. The whole idea of the council turning on Saren just because of a voice recording is a weak point in the plot.

Ah, yes, this reminds me: all of Shepard's squadmates either don't exist or are doing something else (if Miranda shows up, she probably would be an antagonist). So Tali won't be there to find any evidence, and they'd need to do that themselves one way or another, although I'd probably need to figure out some way for them to do that on the Citadel. Maybe the Shadow Broker or Cerberus would help them in exchange for future favours.

Likewise, this means no Wrex, because how lucky do you have to be to just go and befriend the only reasonable Krogan (potential) authority figure? Instead any work with Krogans would have to be done the hard way, though of course they still might find and charm some reasonably pragmatic Krogan leader in due time.

>Thinking about Batarians, Are you going to keep arrival in? If you ask me the whole idea is quite silly. A reaper clock, Shepard not telling anyone where he was going, and the forced 'difficult' choice.

Not sure yet. The Alpha Relay as a key to the Reaper invasion seems like a good idea, but there probably should be other ways to handle this.

>>24511827Nothing like LHosts, but on the other side, ME has superior weapons (grav-propelled instead of chemical reaction or rail), energy shields of all sorts, genuine, world-killing naval weapons, plus a host of other small bits and bobs here and there. So while Inf. might have an edge in a few select areas, overall power level of the Citadel space is higher I'd say, at least in the military and industrial applications (omnitools, omnigel)

I was thinking of offering an earlier alliance of convenience with Cerberus against Saren, before the team could unearth what else they are up to. I mean, you'd think Cerberus would be interested in screwing over a human-hating Turian Spectre. Of course it wouldn't be anywhere near as close as the alliance Shepard had in Mass Effect 2, and running into Cerberus experiments is liable to sour the team on this deal unless it is much more Renegade than I expect it to be - should be fun.

This is what happens when you switch writing teams halfway through a story. ME 2 began to stray from the Star Trek-esque background of the Mass Effect universe and edge closer to the rock-and-roll sci-fi that concerns itself less with plausibility and more with explosions.

ME 3 attempted to reclaim its slower sci-fi roots by turning the game into a pretentious thought experiment that further muddied the waters of Mass Effect's story. It introduced excessive transparency where none was needed and relied on Macguffins to justify its drastic alterations to the Mass Effect universe. They ignored the overarching threat built up over the previous two games and attempted to force a jigsaw puzzle of character threads, conflict arcs, and internal consistency into a completely new mosaic of suckness.

The Reapers should have been treated a lot like the Borg because that's what the Mass Effect writers ripped off of when they wrote the plot in the first place. They even had a Battle of Wolf 359 kind of thing in the first game where the Reapers attack in idyllic planet.

The Reapers were cold and mysterious, and until the end of the first game you didn't even know if they were capable of thought. Their origins were a mystery and the only thing they wanted was to kill all organic life.

Then ME 2 ruined it by making them even more like the Borg. We find out that they assimilate organic life to make more of themselves. They suck up people and turn em' into goo so they can make giant skeletons that burp. This is wrong for so many reasons, but the worst is yet to come when ME 3 starts throwing philosophy at us.

Don't try explaining the Reapers like BioWare did, because it fucked it up. IMO Reapers went from "oh fuck oh fuck" in ME1 to comical in ME2 and ME3. Harbinger was fucking inept as shit. And in ME3 reapers were just flying around desperately trying to teleport the Citadel (WHY COULD THEY DO THAT AND DIDN'T DO IT SOONER? - DUMB) while chasing one ship.

I could dig the collectors in me2 if the ending wasn't taking down the human reaper before it got finished.

And if it continued the "sceptical galactic community" vibe, perhaps even with hard slaps to the face of Human rights and political access.

And if there was more foreshadowing that scared the player into thinking that they were about to get trounced by the brute-force method of the omnipotent reapers.

And if high profile targets got destroyed, or a planet blown up, to sink in the message that shit was getting real.

Then realizing that the skele-reaper could blue shift into fleets and tear apart capital ships with its bare hands and laser eyes, as it made its way to each Relay one at a time, hard-booting the gateway that would allow the reapers to come from Beyond.

Roll credits, and then at the very end, slowly zoom into a relay. Show some mysterious blinking red light click over to green on some mysterious electronic system.

>>24520459>>24520513Meh, the giant exposed hoses look dumb, what would she need them for anyway? Quarians breath the same air as most other species, they just need to have allergens, bacteria, and virii filtered out of it.

>>24523558The troops can be explained by them using knockoff reaper indoctrination, and their ships look like recolored alliance ships, and they don't have very much of either. You face what, a few dozen platoons through the course of the game? Certainly not unreasonable for an organization that's implied to have the level of monetary resources Cerberus does.

>>24523701I forget where it's explained exactly but that group was initially not affiliated with TIM in any way, the just took the name Cerberus from his manifesto. At some point in between the first and second game TIM got them to join his organization and took the name for his own group.

ME2 actually works really well as the FIRST Mass Effect game with the actual ME1 as the second game.

Think about it.

Human colonies are disappearing, but humans are a non-Council race with no real allies or political connections in the galaxy. They are growing, but they aren't there. Now they are being threatened by some mysterious entity.

After much bitching, they convince the Council to do something and to pacify humanity the Council even agrees to accept the first human into the Spectres. To mentor him they assign their top agent, Saren. He will observe Shepard's investigation into the colony abductions and evaluate him.

The game plays out much the same only without a Lazarus and thus no Cerberus, Jacob, Miranda, ect... Or Cerberus are the secondary antagonists, who want Collector tech. The details are going to be different, but the point is the core will stay mostly unchanged, just with different actors.

Anyway, at the end Shepard learns something peculiar. It seems the Collectors were acting under the direction of... something else. What was it though? All Shepard has is a strange device being built in the Collector base and the blue prints for more strange machines that vaguely resemble it.

Saren and Shepard part ways, and Shepard becomes a Spectre.

Come ME2 (the original ME1) the plot plays out mostly the same. There is no Nihlus because we don't need him in this equation. Instead we meet Saren on Eden Prime, our old mentor, but he betrays us (perhaps he murders a squadmate from the first game). The rest of the plot is the same too, only this time Shepard finally learns the truth on Virmire. After the events of the first game Saren eventually discovered the truth behind the Collectors. However he felt it was hopeless (thanks to subtle indoctrination) so he kept it hidden and began collaborating.

The the second part (former ME1) happens, and this time, rather than saving only humanity from a potent but small threat, we save Citadel space from a geth armada and their Reaper god. The plot and the stakes have expanded and gotten bigger. In the first game we fought Collector proxies like mercs and slavers, then a relatively small and isolated group of Reaper minions. This time we fight an entire army of geth and cloned krogan and rachni. This time the climax wasn't in an isolated part of the galaxy, but at its core in a massive ship battle.

At the end Shepard walks off determined to thwart the Reapers, knowing that their arrival awaits in the near-future.

>>24522683>And if it continued the "sceptical galactic community" vibe, perhaps even with hard slaps to the face of Human rights and political access.That was never going to happen so soon after humanity saved the collective galaxy's ass.

>>24523792>>24523804I was thinking something similar, but with a slight change.The team weren't spectres at the end of the suicide mission equivalent. That was all human action, thinking, acting and planning out an impossible mission against incredible odds. They return with some things.

A spectre that has helped them comes to them at the beginning of ME2(former 1) and says that thanks to outstanding bravery and skill they have proven to be spectre quality. The council would just like to have a true spectre following them on a mission to see that it was not a fluke. Pure routine and protocol. The contacts they made earlier gives them the normandy and the group head out to a chilling mission to Eden Prime before returning to the council and getting their titles.

Not sure if this is what I'd go with, but it's a good idea nonetheless. It could be fun to have Saren play along with them at the start, perhaps working against some mutual threat, only to betray them at some point and grab the Beacon (or some other Reaper-related item) for himself. Of course, meta knowledge will make it not very surprising, but it still would affect the dynamic and make it more personal from the start.

Hmm. Any ideas on how you would prove Saren's betrayal without Tali? I suppose your best shot would be tracking down any co-conspirators or supporters he might have.

I could also see it happening if human officials started to replace a few turians in high up positions, breeding resentment, and then huge failures in me2 are put in propoganda to make everyone doubt the newcomer species.

Maybe human ships so preoccupied with human affairs that they neglect calls for aid or military action.

>>24525972Again, no. That's shit for way down the line to dislodge them from the top after they're firmly rooted in it. Sort of like how European WW2 revisionism is that the Americans didn't do shit but at the time they were real grateful for the help.

Yeah, that makes sense. Really, it's surprising that Citadel Space didn't outright slide into a mini-cold war in the most Renegade-like playthrough (well, not really, Bioware wouldn't have wanted to bother with that).

To be honest that always struck me as less tsundere revisionism ("we didn't need your help, baka") and more a reaction to how much Western cinema tends to portray WW2 as being "America heroically kills Nazis and protects Freedom (with a little help from some guys with funny accents)".

If the Reapers enter the galaxy, it's game over for galactic civilisation. That's how it felt in Mass Effect 1, and it's how you should play them up. They've had billions of years to build up their forces and their technology, after all.

But they still have indoctrinated agents in the galaxy working to bring them back. Sovereign wasn't the only plan they had, that'd be stupid.

Keep the Reapers as a pernicious, existential threat who work through agents in the galaxy.. and have your PC's fight those agents. Collectors, Geth, Indoctrinated foes.. I'm sure you can come up with a load of them.

Meanwhile, there's the other day to day struggles in the Mass Effect universe going on. Batarian terrorism, Human/Turian tension, too many hot Asari to bang, Cerberus being dicks. Mix it up a bit.